New poll finds Americans hopelessly optimistic about going to Mars

Last summer a group promoting the exploration of Mars — named, well, Explore Mars — dropped a large red rock in front of Houston’s city hall. Designed the look like a Martian boulder, the fake rock helped build momentum for what ultimately was a successful landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars.

Yet the group’s ultimate aim is not sending robots to Mars, but rather humans. So earlier this month the group conducted a nationwide survey of U.S. citizens that focused on the exploration of Mars.

Will humans walk on Mars by 2033?

The group has not released the full results of the survey of 1,001 Americans, but it did issue a summary. And what sticks out to me is the seemingly hopeless optimism of Americans that we’ll put a human on Mars within two decades, by 2033.

Some of the results pertaining to the statement, “I am confident humans will go to Mars by 2033.”

71% of Americans are confident that humans will walk on Mars by 2033

Young people are more confident.

73% of Americans ages 18-24 are confident humans will go to Mars by 2033.

This age group of 18-24 has the highest confidence percentage that humans will go to Mars by 2033 and in their lifetime.

71% of both white and black Americans are confident humans will go to Mars by 2033.

79% of Asian Americans are confident humans will go to Mars by 2033, and 80% of Native Americans are confident of this.

I’d love nothing more than to see a human walk on Mars within two decades, but to believe this suspends reality in a couple of ways.

First of all, under the very best of scenarios, ones in which NASA delivers a rocket and space capsule on time and on budget, the space agency will launch humans into an orbit around the moon in 2021.

Alas that’s probably a date that should be taken with a grain of salt.

Officially NASA has a goal of sending humans to Mars by the 2030s, but that’s not actually to the surface, just into orbit around the red planet. In other words, even from an optimistic, eyes-wide-shut to reality point of view, NASA is not planning to send humans to the surface of Mars in the 2030s.

Now there are other possibilities. Elon Musk has talked of sending humans to the surface of Mars within 15 years. And China is a rising space power. Nevertheless the same challenges that face NASA will face them: Mars is 600 times more distant than the moon, there’s space radiation, and there’s much more challenging gravity to launch from than the surface of the moon. And all of this is darned expensive.

The fact of the matter is that to believe humans will walk on Mars by 2030 is either hopelessly naive, blindly optimistic, or both. I’d love to be wrong.